Medical social network Alliance Health buys Seattle’s Medify

Medify, a Seattle startup that helps people find detailed medical information about diseases, has been acquired in a deal of undisclosed size by Alliance Health Networks. Based in Salt Lake City, Alliance Health operates niche-oriented social networks for more than three dozen diseases.

Its most popular site is Diabetic Connect, described as the largest social network for those suffering from diabetes. Alliance Health raised $11 million in funding last year from New World Ventures, Physic Ventures, Highway 12 Ventures and EPIC Ventures.

Derek Streat

Medify is backed by Voyager Capital, having raised $1.8 million from the Seattle venture capital firm and others last year. It was started by Derek Streat — a former employee at AdReady and Classmates.com — who learned in 2009 that his two-year-old daughter was facing a life-threatening autoimmune disease.

“Despite having world-class doctors, finding all the answers we wanted, especially those backed by data from real patients like my daughter, was difficult,” Streat told GeekWire last year. “Making sense of it was nearly impossible. And knowing what to do with it, even more daunting.”

As we’ve noted in the past, there’s been an awful lot of activity in the so-called Health 2.0 sector recently, including the arrival of companies such as EveryMove, Habit Labs, Mindbloom, Keas and others.

UPDATE: Streat tells GeekWire that Alliance Health plans to bolster the operations in the Seattle area.

“Alliance is making a pretty big commitment to the area as it makes Seattle it’s technology hub; so lots of growth on the way,” said Streat.

Streat also added that the Medify acquisition marks the 5th exit for him and co-founder Jay Bartot. They’ve also been involved in companies such as Classmates, Farecast, Netbot and Adrelevance.

John Cook is GeekWire's co-founder and editor, a veteran reporter and the longest-serving journalist on the Pacific Northwest tech startup beat. Follow him @johnhcook and email john@geekwire.com.

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Paul Uhlir

Derek’s win streak continues. Well done team Medify.

David Shim

Congrats Jay and the Medify Team!

Derek Streat

Thanks for the support.

A couple of points of color:

It’s important everyone know the real story is this team, of which I am only a small part. My co-founder, Jay Bartot, and most of the rest of our team were the technology leadership at Farecast (sold to MSFT), Adrelevance (sold to Nielsens), and other well-known Seattle companies. Medify began as an experiment to see if the same data analysis and prediction technologies they built in those companies could be applied to health information search to yield relevant and valuable insights for patients and families. We found that it indeed could…and so much more. Our merger with Alliance Health rewards our investors and team well for their support and effort, and it provides us the opportunity to bring our health insights platform to the millions of patients Alliance Health serves each month.

Also, Alliance Health is making a significant commitment to Seattle. Medify will continue to operate as a separate entity, and Seattle will become Alliance Health’s technology hub focusing on innovative solutions at the intersection of big data and health.

Exciting times.

http://www.facebook.com/brant.williams Brant Williams

And that’s how they draw it up on in the playbook. Well done.

http://blog.calbucci.com/ Marcelo Calbucci

Congrats Derek & Jay. Super happy for you, your team and investors.

http://twitter.com/Veriously Verious, Inc.

Awesome milestone Derek and the Medify team. You guys are rock stars.

http://PhysicalActivity.com/ Kyle Sandau

That’s great to hear! Congratulations, guys and gals. We’re working on something pretty big, and basically in a similar realm to Medify, called PhysicalActivity™, but are much more broad-based in scope and audience (Health, Fitness & Happiness).

Though I’ve not been involved in five or more exits, so far, I used to own StumbleUpon.com, and have my hands in a lot of other ventures that are on the stove, cooking their way to serving temperature.

We are Seattle-based as well, and are looking forward to integrating further into the local tech scene too.